Why We Need Collaborative Communication Skills For a Better Future
The key to addressing our conflicts with open minds, ears, and hearts
This week’s topic is collaborative communication, one of the four strategic themes of the Omni-Win Project. My project aims to help us co-create a future of democracy where everyone wins: To build a political culture where we’re looking out for everyone’s needs and including every perspective.
We need to be able to communicate across our differences, understand each other, collaborate, and make decisions that can meet everyone’s needs. We already have the tools; we have the people. How do I know this? From decades in conflict resolution.
I started by studying international relations, with intercultural communication as my focus. I wanted to help people communicate across cultures, a vital tool in our world. When I was in the Peace Corps, a friend told me that helping people communicate across our differences was called mediation.
I was 20-something years old and didn’t know about mediation. That’s one of humanity’s big problems. I would love to live in a world where everyone knows about mediation, conflict resolution, and dialogue—a world where people refuse to put up with poor communication and terrible conflicts.
Mediation is amazing. As long as people are willing to listen to each other, communicate honestly, be open to new solutions, and be willing to keep their agreements, they can resolve their issues. Usually, we can do it in about three hours, and it works 80-90% of the time.
Some conflicts are a little more complex, but if people are willing to talk through them in good faith, we have a process that can work. The core of mediation is an interest-based conflict resolution process. Over history, we have had three ways of resolving conflicts.
Power
Rights (Laws)
Interests
Power is simple: Whoever’s the most powerful wins.
We came up with laws and a rights-based way of resolving conflict. Here, we see what legislators wrote down, and that decides who wins and who loses. The great thing about rights and laws is that they’re universal and theoretically apply to everyone.
The problem with rights and laws? Well, there are three:
There are still winners and losers.
People in power usually make them.
We’re never going to get them nuanced enough to deal with people’s various experiences: We cannot refine them enough to cover each eventuality.
Now, let’s look at the interest-based model.
Interest-based thinking is “What is in your interest right now in this context?” We need a specific conversation about the issues at hand. With a facilitator or a mediator, you can figure out an answer.
Upon returning from the Peace Corps, I went to Seattle's King County Dispute Resolution Center. (Thank you to all my mentors there.) I learned that this interest-based thinking is rooted in nonviolent communication, which Marshall Rosenberg created. The whole concept of nonviolent communication is figuring out the needs at the heart of whatever people are trying to do. We do that through speaking about our needs and listening to each other’s needs.
Here’s a list of universal human needs. It’s things that everyone needs and wants in their life, including respect, care, and safety. The idea is that we figure out what people need, and from there, we can develop different strategies for meeting everyone’s needs.
The cool thing about talking about needs is that you can figure out what the conflict is about. We can recognize each other in that space. “Oh wow, you just want connection, safety, and respect. Well, I want those too! I’m also looking for beauty and order in my life,” and the other person might recognize your needs. This can help people figure out how to resolve their problems when discussing what they want and need.
At the center, I got the chance to be the case manager, and I talked to hundreds of people calling in about their conflicts. There are a lot of crazy things that people have disputes about. I observed that everyone who called us was a really good person, and they were dealing with a “monster,” someone who was doing horrible things.
Then I would talk to the other person, and guess what? They were a really nice person dealing with a “monster,” too. This helped me realize that pretty much everyone’s just trying to do their best in this world, but we’re miscommunicating a ton. Mediators have these important nonviolent communication skills, but most people don’t. Thankfully, you can find someone who does, so they can help you resolve your conflicts.
To deepen my understanding, I went to the American Bar Association’s ADR conference. (ADR stands for alternative dispute resolution.) Much of mediation is an alternative to going to court. You could try to sue someone, take them to court and use that rights-based approach, or use mediation, an interest-based approach. While at this conference, I noticed these people were thinking about negotiation and how to win, and it just wasn’t my favorite part about mediation.
I wanted to discover the other side of the spectrum, and someone pointed me to the National Coalition of Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). So, I went to the conference in Austin, Texas, and it blew my mind. Suddenly, I was in this space where people were talking about huge, complex issues. They had processes to get up to a thousand people to have a coherent conversation about a topic and develop great ways of moving forward.
So, that was impressive and exciting. Thinking about how we could scale this up further was intriguing to me.
The people in complex dialogue and facilitation weren’t considering themselves as part of conflict resolution. Mediation and dialogue aren’t necessarily hanging out with each other.
We have individual mediation for a few people, but we have tools for even larger conversations. A mediator book group introduced me to two amazing books: Kenneth Cloke’s Conflict Revolution, which presented the idea that conflict is a fractal, and there’s something similar in John Paul Lederach’s book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. So, what do we mean by fractals?
A fractal is a mathematical concept. The mathematical definition is something that’s in between dimensions. The layman’s definition is that a fractal is self-similar at all scales. So, the small part looks like the bigger part, which looks like the largest part. Think about the branches of a tree: A small branch looks like a bigger branch, which looks like the tree itself. It appears the same at all scales.
Conflict is definitely like that. Disputes between siblings, countries, or political parties all have the same flavor. The next thing is that a conflict is treated by a recursive algorithm, meaning that we’re constantly asking the same question repeatedly, whatever the results are. We apply that algorithm or that question to the output and repeat. It seems that the algorithm is based on this question of self and other.
What’s good for me?
What’s good for you?
What’s good for us?
I am constantly asking that question. When are my needs important? When are your needs important? Different ways I can approach this question will yield new results, which I can apply that question to again. So we’re in this recursive algorithm.
Fractals lead to infinite complexity. Conflict is a similarly complex, natural thing stemming from diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Because we have different ways of seeing the world and experiencing life, we will always have conflict. Every time we resolve conflict between two of us, we have to deal with the conflict with another group of people. And then we have to deal with the larger group and the larger group. The better we get at conflict, the more complexity we’re going to have in our system because we will be folding in more and more people constantly.
If conflict is a fractal, then conflict resolution must also be a fractal. I went to graduate school and studied International Peace and Security Studies in Argentina. I also got the chance to work in Colombia and Ecuador.
As I observed these different conflicts, I realized, “Whoa, the really big issues that we have? We need to break them down into smaller pieces.” While we have more technology now, we still don’t have the technology to have a conversation with millions of people.
Still, we can have conversations with 30,000 people. There are cool technologies for whole communities or cities to talk about important issues. So we can take these big conflicts, break them down into smaller ones, and tens of thousands of people can speak. That gives me a ton of hope. We have the tools to do this; we just have to try them.
The next part of my journey was interviewing Kenneth Cloke for my old podcast, Fractal Friends. Ken also wrote a book called Politics, Dialogue, and the Evolution of Democracy. He invited me to a new project, the DPACE Initiative, which stands for Democracy, Politics, And Conflict Engagement.
We started thinking about how we could bring all of these conflict resolution tools into our democracy and politics. The first strategy we came up with was to work with organizations having internal conflicts. Imagine an advocacy or interest group, anything from animal rights to gun rights, to a political party, whatever it is.
There’s pressure to figure out how to advocate for their cause within this group. There can be conflict about the best way to be going forward and what values they should have. These conflicts happen because these groups are trying to organize the world into right and wrong. Organizations tear themselves apart because they can’t figure out how to work together for their cause, let alone reach out and communicate with their “enemies.”
So, there’s this challenge of communicating their cause to everyone, especially those they need to convince. That becomes a huge challenge. We’ve put together a conflict literacy framework to introduce people in the field of politics and social change to all the different tools and mechanisms.
We’re recently an independent organization. If you have a personal conflict, political conflict, or an organization that’s struggling to work together or communicate your message to other people, that’s what we can help with. You can learn more about the DPACE Initiative here.
Coming back to Ken Cloke and how this fits into our politics and democracy, he has this idea that there’s a three-part recipe for political conflict:
There needs to be inequality
There needs to be diversity
There needs to be a win-lose process.
If you have power imbalances, people with differences, and people trying to win, hoping that other people will lose, that’s how you get political conflict.
There are three ways we can get rid of political conflict:
Try to reduce inequality.
Get rid of diversity.
Remove the win-lose process.
Reducing inequality
Reducing inequality is a noble cause and very important. Politics is really just about how we allocate power. In a certain way, we can’t actually get rid of all the inequality as we still have people in positions of power. That includes judges, police, politicians, or simply people who have the money and resources to make things happen.
There’s some great work by John Paul Lederach about how you need to get some level of conflict resolution equality before you can even have a fair conversation. This is why movements protest or lobby to get into a place of equal power where they can at least step up to the negotiating table.
Remove diversity
Another way we can remove political conflict is by getting rid of diversity. Now that sounds pretty dark, and it sure can be. But most of the time, we remove diversity by siloing out or polarizing. Imagine the animal rights or gun-rights group again. They can get rid of conflict within the organization by eliminating the people who disagree with them. If you don’t believe in the right of everyone to have a gun, or if you don’t believe in the need to protect animals, then you’re probably not going to be part of that organization.
And so ta-da, diversity is gone. Now they can come up with solutions! But these organizations can’t communicate with people who disagree because they’re trying to reduce diversity. They can’t understand the approach of the other side anymore.
Get rid of the win-lose process
The last way we can reduce political conflict is by removing the win-lose process. To me, this is one of the best things we can do to reduce political conflict. If you’re not trying to beat someone, they don’t have to lose. Everyone can win.
We can develop collaborative solutions and embrace collaborative communication when we have processes that create all winners. Those opportunities are already available to us to resolve conflicts. All it takes is to come into a process where you’re trying to figure out what each other cares about.
Now, this brings us back to the beginning, where people either don’t know that this is possible, or they don’t really believe it.
It’s hard to believe it because our current system loves talking about polarization. While it’s understandably hard to imagine that we can do this, I will give you a window into how this works. This strategy applies whether we’re doing it with two people or a whole group.
How collaborative communication works
The first thing is to give everyone a chance to talk about what they need to say without being interrupted. The goal is to figure out what is really at the heart of the issue for each person. A facilitator will reflect back and make sure that their words are totally understood. Everyone hears this person’s description of what’s going on.
Together, everyone discovers the question they’re all trying to answer and works out a way of moving forward together.
There are tons of different creative processes that we can use for that. There’s this book called The Change Handbook, which includes 60 methods for discovering collaborative, innovative solutions for everyone.
We have this ability to have this conversation where we all come up with creative solutions, and then we have the process of deciding which ones we’re going to do. From there, we can experiment and find a way forward. That’s a way of resolving one conflict. But if we really want to change things, we need to look deeper into the issue to see if the solution worked.
We have to move forward together because we’re all responsible for the solution and the outcome. If the initial idea doesn’t work, brainstorm something new to try, and repeat the process until things are working. The more we reflect on an issue, the more we discover what’s at the heart of it. An ongoing conversation keeps us changing and evolving.
If we disagree with each other, especially if we’re having an emotional reaction to it, we’ve discovered something that someone really cares about. It means we have a line right into their heart. This is a huge opportunity.
If we can figure out how to trust each other and talk about these things that are so important to us, we can make sure that those things are being taken care of. Conflict becomes an opportunity to thrive, and that is a beautiful thing.
But where do we go from here? This points to the other three strategic themes of the Omni-Win Project. We need to figure out ways to apply this in our actual democracy, at all scales, from our city council to the very top. There are amazing tools for participatory democracy and citizen-led deliberative conversations, and we can build that into our political system. That’s what next week’s essay is about.
A challenge is understanding this on a bigger scale: How do we do this on a national, international, and even humanity level? Well, what’s amazing is we have philosophers that are thinking about the cutting edge ways we can change our civilization.
What different rules could our civilization have? What can help us hold all the different voices together? So that’s what I’ll talk about the week after next.
Of course, there’s that little voice in our head like, “Ooh, this sounds really scary. I don’t know if I want to open up to the possibility that other people might be right or have something valid to share because that feels threatening, or the possibility that maybe I don’t have all the answers and I might be wrong.” Those all sound difficult. That’s the fourth category: Self-acceptance. That allows us to be omnipartial, partial to everyone.
How can we as individuals, as a culture, as a system, and in our interrelationships decide we want to be able to take care of every person who’s involved?
What is best for you? What is best for me? And how do we do that?
Those answers are coming soon, too.
I promise you the tools are out there. I’ll share various resources here if you want to read or get more involved with this work. I hope that I’ve conveyed my enthusiasm for collaborative communication and the tools out there.
If you enjoy these topics, stay tuned by subscribing here on Substack. I’ll be posting the Omni-Win Project podcast here this summer, too!
Here are some resources for further learning:
Effective Communication Skills by Duncan Autrey: https://www.duncanautrey.com/effective-communication
Mediate Your Life has excellent resources on nonviolent communication here.
Wise-Democracy Pattern Language – Co-Intelligence Institute.
Collaborating with the Enemy by Adam Kahane
High Conflict by Amanda Ripley
Transformative Dialogue Article Series by Ryan Nakade:
Transformative Dialogue Part 1: 10 techniques to “change someone’s mind”
Transformative Dialogue Part Two: Twelve meta-frames for self-advocacy
Want to learn more about mediation or need to find a mediator?
Check out Mediate.com or look up your local mediation center.
If you want to train in mediation, I recommend: https://www.seedscrc.org/training
If you prefer to watch your content, here’s a video of this essay:
You can find more information about the work I do in conflict transformation on my website: http://www.omni-win.com
You can schedule a call with me here: https://calendly.com/duncanautrey
Don’t forget to check out the rest of my posts as I discuss how we can work together to ensure we all win.
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